Seemed like I had just begun, and here it was 1:30 already!

"You look like Big Foot with that coat on!" I said. Karl was not a small man. While I was the runner on the team, Karl cleared the way so I'd have an opening to run through. And he was built for the job!

"I could eat like Big Foot right now!" he answered. "Let's have some lunch. What are you doing?" he added.

"Been writing down some ideas I got from a dream last night."

"What?"

"I said I've been writing down some ideas I got from a dream last night."

"That's what I thought you said. What the hell are you talking about?" Karl peered at me with that intense green eye of his.

Sometimes I think that Karl's eye was taken from him not to keep him out of pro football, as he sometimes postulates, but rather for the protection of the people he looks at. He has enough power in that one eye to make up for the one he lost and then some!

Feeling a shade intimidated by his look and the hint of sarcasm in his inquiry, I began, "Last night I had the most 'real' dream."

"A wet one, I trust."

"Damn it, Karl! I'm serious!"

"And I'm dying of starvation. You'll have to wait a minute or deliver your oration to a dead audience!"

He disappeared into the kitchen, emerging a moment later with a pint bottle of carrot juice in his left hand; peanut butter, jelly, salami, brick cheese, and lettuce sandwiched precariously between two oversized slices of wheatberry bread in his right hand; and a paper towel with a freshly rinsed carrot inside it tucked between his forearm and his chest. He was big on carrots.

"Okay," he said, "lay it on me." His beanbag chair cringed briefly before yielding to his 240-pound onslaught.

Pacing the floor, I told him of the fantastic freedom I had experienced a mere seven hours ago. His angular face remained impassive, but as I finished, it broke into a huge grin.